Macedonia History

 Professor Victor Friedman is one of the world’s foremost experts on Balkan languages, and has been studying them for almost four decades, since 1993 as a linguist at the University of Chicago. Professor Friedman has a special place in his heart for Macedonia, which he first visited in 1971. This year finds him back in the country, as the recipient of a Fulbright-Hays Grant from the US Department of Education and a research grant from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.(All opinions expressed herein are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the funding organizations.) Balkanalysis.com Director Christopher Deliso caught up with Professor Friedman recently in Skopje for an interview. Their engrossing and wide-ranging conversation, covering everything from linguistic history, politics and lobbying to national identity and multiculturalism, is reproduced below for our readers. Christopher Deliso: Victor, thanks for taking the time to discuss your ideas and your research, ...

Vitomir Dolinski: An Interview with the Persecuted Albanian Academic Professor Dr. Kaplan Resuli-Burovich Translated from Macedonian by Zhivko Apostolovski From the Macedonian daily newspaper Vest - 25.02.2003 VD: - You are regarded as a unique, albanian Mandela, but also as a political prisoner-record holder on the Balkan. For the insufficiently informed, at the beginning, tell us briefly about this? Dr. Kaplan Resuli-Burovich: - In former Yugoslavia I was sentenced two years strict imprisonment, allegedly for propaganda against the socialism and the “brotherhood and unity”. After I served the punishment to the last day in the jail Idrizovo, wishing to escape to the Soviet Union I got stuck in Albania with which the USSR exactly those days severed its diplomatic relations. After the ten-year internment I was arrested by the albanian authorities and sentenced 43 years of a most monstrous imprisonment, again allegedly for antigovernment propaganda, in possession of some...

Some 30 years ago, the understanding of the ancient Macedonians has changed and and they were now declared as pure Hellenes, even though, until then, they were considered as, at best, a people in need of Hellenization, says Victor Davis Hanson, American scholar on the Classical period and its warfare, and a well known Conservative opinion maker. Hanson says that it can’t be said with certainty whether this change was due to new scientific, or tourist and political reasons. In his interview with MIA, he Hoover Institution professor also discussed the decline of the West, President Obamas views on Europe and the change in the way the Western countries approach warfare. Professor Hanson, you have devoted a fair amount of your life studying and writing about Greece, its history, culture and civilization, but also on warning about the decay of Western civilization in general. What are your personal views on the Greek collapse in the last three years, which in a way combined these tw...

INTERVIEW: PROF. NESTOR OGINAR The Olympian Gods and The Rape of Macedonia When on Aug. 9, thousands of Macedonian-Americans marched from the State Department—where a delegation met for one hour with Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage—to the White House, one man was marching in front of the huge banners, flags, and posters, a megaphone in his hand. He was Nestor Oginar, a professor of English literature in New York City, whose family are still in the city of Tetovo, Macedonia , the center of the Kosovo Liberation Army's bloody assault. Professor Oginar's sister had abandoned the family home after it was targetted by 70 large-caliber shells; but in a "surge of pride," she had gone back. There were many from Tetovo at the demonstration. Oginar addressed the crowd in an unusual style, using his classical English to reach the Macedonians and the curious American tourists. It was a strong political and emotional oration, but at the same time a lesson of ...